No Answers There Are Found
by Tiger Mother
Summary: The Bifrost is healed and Thor leaves for Midgard, but not before making peace and a promise to his Queen and Mother. One shot, Post-Canon. Pre-Avengers.


**NO ANSWERS THERE ARE FOUND**

"_**My mother was a saviour of six foot of bad behaviour**_

_**Long blonde curly hair down to her thigh,"**_

**-Laura Marling**

**I'm a bit of a sucker for mother/son relationships, so here's this. I do not own Thor or any of the characters mentioned hereafter.**

**.**

He finds her in her favourite glade, kneeling by the water, washing strange clothes in the lazy trickle of the stream. The afternoon sun turns her hair to blinding gold. Her hands work back and forth, graceful as the stream, but the rest of her remote, still as the fox that watches her from the other bank, just as bound as he is.

She's beautiful, his old mother, and strong in ways he'll never be. But he never knows what to say to her anymore. Before Midgard, he had assumed that a smile and a cheerful embrace would suffice in place of a conversation, and since he only ever smiled at and embraced his mother, that there was simply nothing else for a mother and son.

He hadn't meant any disrespect in it, but he sees now that it must have been insulting in some ways. To be brushed off and never sought out. Redundant. And yet she took him, bore him, with never a word in spite. Just another he'd taken for granted.

Loki and mother were always so in tune.

No one will talk about his brother. The Allfather is difficult to catch, and when Thor finally manages to corner his father, Odin is distant and full of some ageless sorrow that is difficult to witness. The warriors three would be uncomfortable with the topic; they were never close with Loki. Thor knows Sif will listen if he asks her to. Several times, in fact, she has made attempts at getting him to talk, but he finds he cannot bear to open his heart before Sif. He realises, only days before he is to leave, that there is only one person who can do anything about the hollow swell of shameful, childish sorrow in his chest. He needs his mother.

"The Bifrost is healed," The Queen announced, startling him from his reverie. "When do you take your leave?"

"Tommorow. At dawn."

She is quiet for some time. "Come here," She says then, lightly, looking over her shoulder, "Make yourself useful and wring these out."

Though a queen, his mother has never been fond of idle hands, and he smiles quietly as he approaches the stream and sits beside her. She hands him a small, dark red garment, meeting his eyes warmly for a moment before returning to her work.

"Be careful not to tear," She murmurs. Gently, and somewhat cautiously, for clothes so small could only be a woman's, he rinses the water from them. Upon determining that it was not underclothes, Thor holds the garment out, tilting his head in confusion at the shape and cut of it.

He looks down at Frigg, who is watching him from under her eyelashes.

"Are these-?"

"Your clothes," She confirms, a smile in her voice. "That tunic in particular was something you were very fond of, if I recall. You wore through the elbows on several occasions, but refused to be fitted for a new one. I was patching it up every other night it seemed."

Thor flattens the tunic in the grass. He can't help but grin at the sight of it- it's ridiculously small. Deep red and gold trimmed, soft and thin, ovbiously something created with the warm weather in mind. He tries to remember being of a size that could fit in such a tunic, although most of what he can recall from such an age involves the clack of wooden swords.

"Where did you find them?" He asks. Mother has gone back to washing.

"Oh, they have always been in storage. But everything from below the parlour is being moved to the upper levels. I thought they could at least have one last wash," She handed him the matching pair of dark blue trousers. "Before they go in the dark."

"I did not know you had kept them," He says quietly and watches her. Watches her hands, their rhythmic, soothing motion. Remembers the feel of them in his hair when she would attempt to comb it.

And now she's washing something different. Fine cloth in golden river green and muddy brown. They're clothes for playing and for wrestling and- and they're Loki's clothes and a thousand memories summon themselves at the sight of the them; Loki grinning down at him from the high branches of an oak, Loki sitting in front of him on a makeshift sledge, skimming down the stairs of the great hall, Loki sitting before the fire reading to him from a book, hair wet from bath time. And his _smell_; Thor had almost forgotten his brother's smell. Smokey, but not the smoke of forges and war. The smoke of a secret green flame deep in a forest, quiet and controlled, but with power and ferocity enough to free all trees to smoke and to the sky.

He cannot breath.

"Oh, Thor," His mother lets her shoulders drop. "Oh, my darling."

"I miss-" His throat is closed, his voice is painful, and when his mother moves across to take him in her arms he does not protest. He's a thousand years old and feels younger now than he ever has.

Because times have been difficult before, and the path forward such a daunting thing, but never had Thor contemplated the idea that his brother would not be at his side for the first step and all that followed. Father was old and one day would be no more- the same was true of mother. In a strange way, Thor had long believed his brother the only one he could count on to always be there.

They sit there until evening inks the sky in pink and purple, and the sun retreats behind the horizon. The fox has gone. The clothes are dry. The stream whistles and hushes.

"I was never a very good son to you," He says, his voice muffled and bitter against her shoulder. "You were but the woman who bore me; nothing more. Not a friend, nor a confidant. I never sought you for advice I'm sure you longed to give, I never spent _time_ with you aside from when I had to, always more concerned with glory and fighting-"

"Thor-"

"And I _hate_ to leave you here, with Father a ghost and- and no Loki," He says. He pulls away to meet her eyes. How small he feels in them. "But I have to go. I made a promise, but- It is more than that. I will go, and return a better man. And I _swear_ to you, Mother, if Loki is out there, I _will_ find him. I _will_ return him to us. I swear it."

She puts a hand either side of his face, looking sadder now than he's seen her since the night the bifrost- the night _they_ shattered. Her eyes glint with tears she will not shed before her child. His beautiful, strong mother.

"My son," She says, "You need make no such promises to me."

And he feels old, and he feels sad, and he's putting all his faith now in Midgard. On Midgard, things have to be different.

.

**Thank you for reading! If you could review I would be very grateful x)**


End file.
